Simon Slangen

Location-based services, especially the smart phone gps tracker variants, have been on the rise. We have passed the area of video sites (with YouTube on top) and recently of social networking sites (with Facebook the victor). Now the era of geo-based applications has arrived.

For those of you that are new to the concept, a quick explanation. Most phones come equipped with GPS functionality these days. And otherwise with a slightly more approximative location-derivation system. In a nutshell, your smart phone is probably able to deduce its location.

This is not only useful for centering Google Maps, but it also opens a whole range of new, revolutionary gps tracker services. Sometimes geo-tagging is added as a surplus feature (e.g. Twitter geo-tags), but far more interesting are applications like Foursquare and Brightkite which are, in its simplest explanation, location-based networking applications. They allow you to find your friends when they are near, or let people know you’re still held up at work.

There’s only one problem. There are too many alternatives. Sure, each has its advantages, but it proves severely disadvantageous to have your contacts spread out over a large number of networks, and to triple post your own location every time. That’s where Check.in takes the stage.

Back when Songbird – a music player based on Mozilla’s code – initially launched, I was immediately intrigued by the idea. A completely customizable music player. The audio equivalent of Firefox.

Sadly, the critiques were largely true. Songbird was riddled with bugs and sure didn’t mind crashing once in a while.

Since then, Songbird has come a long way. Further than most iTunes fans care to admit. Not only is the little birdie far more stable – about as stable as an application gets – the Songbird addons have greatly matured as well.

Back in 2008, Laurence reviewed Eight Great Songbird Extensions Worth A Test Drive. There are some interesting mentions so check it out, but they’re largely still gimmicks. Yeah, just like a big part of iPhone applications.

The Songbird addons discussed below are serious. They can add a lot of extra value to your Songbird experience. With a bit of luck, it might just be enough to convert you to a new music player.

The Power of Music

The Power of Music